1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computers and computer processors, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for connecting computers together. The predominant current usage of the present invention's direct execution method and apparatus is in the combination of multiple computers on a single microchip, where operating efficiency is important not only because of the desire for increased operating speed but also because of the power savings and heat reduction that are a consequence of the greater efficiency.
2. Description of the Background Art
It is useful in many information processing applications of computers to use multiple processors or multiple computers to speed up operations. Dividing a task and performing multiple processing and computing operations in parallel at the same time is known in the art, as are many systems and structures to accomplish this. An example is systolic array processing wherein a large information stream is divided up among rows of processors that perform sequential computations by column, and pass results to the next column. Other examples are found in the field of supercomputing, wherein multiple processors may be interconnected and tasks assigned to them in a number of different ways, and communication of intermediate results between processors and new data and instructions to them may be provided through crossbar switches, bus interconnection networks with or without routers, or direct interconnections between processors with message passing protocols such as MPICH, used on large machines.
Owing to continual progress in semiconductor technology, more and faster circuits can be placed on a microchip area. Single chip multiprocessor arrays and multicore processors that provide new capabilities and optimizations as embedded systems in consumer and industrial electronic products, by doing computations enormously faster, are examples of improvements which have yielded great economic benefit. Thus further improvement of multiple processors and their interconnections, especially on a single microchip, is highly desirable.